Just a quick post to catch up on our Christmas meal, which furthered my Red Sage Cookthrough efforts. Our Christmas meals typically involve elaborate cooking, which usually means the meat is still on the bone. A favorite in years past has been rack of lamb, but this year’s critter of choice was the pig, and the succulent back ribs contained therein.

Our Christmas meal thus consisted of:

Glazed Pork Baby Back Ribs and Black Coffee-Guajillo Barbecue Sauce

Silver Queen Corn Sticks

The corn sticks were made by special guest chef, Amanda the Baking Queen. They turned out quite well–moist, with great corn flavor.

My typical method of cooking ribs is taken from Joy of Cooking: bake them, covered, in a mixture of BBQ sauce and orange juice for around 3 hours at 300 deg, and then grill them to finish. This consistently produces very tender and delicious ribs for me.

The Red Sage recipe for uses a dry-bake method, so I was initially worried that they wouldn’t be tender. They weren’t quite as tender as my usual method, but were still tender. The sauce was the weird part for me. The glaze and sauce both included a lot of vineagar, which I’m not very fond of to begin with. The flavor mostly boiled out, but the sauce did end up moderately astringent. I prefer a sweeter sauce, so I think next time I would cut back on the vineagar and add more brown sugar. However, the coffee and chile flavor really came through and made it quite enjoyable.